The one with David Edwards (Ericsson)

Speaker A: Uh, welcome to episode 43 of the Talent Intelligence Collective podcast, where we're finally cracking the code on strategic workforce planning, so called dark art. I'm Alan Walker, joined as ever by the brilliant Alison Ettridge and Toby Kulshaw from Lightcast. In Toby's news roundup, we're unpacking the recent Strategic Workforce Planning conference in London where half the vendors were core TI providers. The disciplines are, uh, officially converging, folks. We've also got Deloitte asking whether it's time to break workforce planning out of its silo and McKinsey making the case for HR to take center stage in an agentic AI future. Our guest is David Edwards, a man who spent decades demystifying SWP inside global giants like NatWest and Ericsson, and who's now launching his consultancy, fittingly named Dark Artistry. His upcoming book, the Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook, lands in January, and in our conversation he challenges us to stop planning strategically for the whole workforce and start planning for the workforce that's strategic right now. He also makes a compelling case for using risk as the lever that finally gets CFOs paying attention. So settle in for a masterclass in making workforce planning practical, measurable and genuinely valuable. Stay curious, stay data driven and, uh, most importantly, stay intelligent, folks.

Speaker B: Bye.

Speaker A: Before we get on with the main event, I wanted to remind you that Lightcast kindly sponsors this podcast. Here's a very well spoken chap to tell you more about them.

Speaker C: Lightcast is the global authority on labor market data. By collecting, analyzing and refining profiles, job postings and market data globally, Lightcast provides actionable, data driven talent intelligence, giving HR

Speaker D: leaders the context to make better decisions.

Speaker C: The world's top companies trust Lightcast to deliver clarity in a complex world of work. For more, visit Lightcast IO.

Speaker A: Strategic Workforce Planning. It's been called a dark art for years, but what if we could finally crack the code? You've tuned to episode 43 of the Talent Intelligence Collective podcast and today we're going to try to do exactly that.

Speaker C: Yay.

Speaker A: In the virtual studio with me today are my brilliant co host, Toby Ca from Lightcast and Alison Ettridge, also from Lightcast. Give us a virtual wave and a hello, You2.

Speaker B: Hello, YouTube.

Speaker A: Uh, now, today's guest has spent decades turning the dark art of workforce planning into something practical, measurable and genuinely valuable. Valuable. He's built and led workforce planning inside global giants, helped shape industry standards, and, um, might have a book coming out next year. Plus, his consultancy is literally called Dark Artistry, which I absolutely love. Please welcome, David Edwards.

Speaker C: David, hello.

Speaker A: Say hello.

Speaker C: How are you? I'll say hello already.

Speaker A: Brilliant.

Speaker C: It's a long time since I did university radio, but I've still got the face for it.

Speaker A: Please can you let us know if I missed anything in my very short, abridged intro about you?

Speaker C: Well, if. If you have, I'll make up for it later on, don't worry.

Speaker A: Perfect. Well, it's great to have you here.

Speaker C: It's very nice.

Speaker A: I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna start with one question, but obviously we'll get on to the. The real questioning later on in the show. Where does the name Dark Artistry come from?

Speaker C: I had actually had somebody who, uh, kind of sort of questioned whether I really ought to call it Dark Artistry, as though it sort of. It was some sort of, you know, black magic. But, um, but no, I just remember somebody talking to me at some stage saying that, uh, you know, SWP is a bit of a dark art.

Speaker D: And.

Speaker C: And I then sort of went online looking for a website name and Dark Artistry just turned up. And so the rest is history.

Speaker A: That makes absolute sense. And coming from a man who had named his consulting firm Udder, I cannot question the name of anyone else'. For those that are new, uh, to our podcast, here's how we're going to roll. So, first up, Toby's going to give us his usual, uh, trademark news roundup, and then Allison will be leading our chat with David, and, uh, knowing her, she'll get right to the heart of what, um, the dark arts of workforce planning really are. Uh, so, Toby, over to you. What's happening in the world of TI over the last couple of weeks or so.

Speaker D: Well, thank you. And, um, I'd never really considered the fact you called your company Udder. Uh, and then I was thinking about something around sucking on the teat of technology or something. I went horribly.

Speaker B: Toby, where are you going?

Speaker D: Family show.

Speaker A: Toby, Family show.

Speaker D: I said teat. Teat. Anyway, moving swiftly on. Um, so, um, it's been a fun couple of weeks, the last couple of weeks. So last week we had the Strategic Workforce Planning Conference in London, and we had a. Or brilliant dinner the night before, which was, um, awesome fun as always. And then two days of the. Of the conference, um, and I had kind of a few key thoughts from it all. Um, I wanted to kind of discuss. And I know David and Alison are there as well, so. Great. Would love to hear your thoughts, too. But I think the key bits for me, I think TI and swp, I think they can continue to get closer and closer both from. I was kind of witnessing that from what the speakers, who they were, what they were saying, and also purely the vendors. If you look at the vendor space, 50% of the vendors were core TI providers or platforms we'd consider, traditionally consider, sorry, uh, core TI providers. So I think that gap is rapidly collapsing and you're seeing more and more SWP teams taking on TI activities and TI teams being asked to do the SWP things. I think that's um, changing. I think that also folds into SWP moving into a much more aggressive mid term, near term agile intelligence rather than the big bang long term focus, which I think would definitely be something for us all to debate and talk about. Um, I kind of got a feeling that speed and direction of travel and that kind of direction correct type piece was almost more important at the moment than being accurate. Um, and I know we've had debates on here before around accuracy versus direction. Correct. Uh, but it feels like the world is so fragile and decision making is so erratic that actually having a direction of travel and kind of multiple attack points feels better and more fluid than having a hyper accuracy that can be a bit fragile. Um, and then most importantly, uh, getting rid of the silos, I think we touched on it here before, uh, getting rid of those silos. The amount of conversations around roping in and getting together different parts of your organization, whether it's finance, whether it's real estate, etc. Bringing that all together and then kind of having a single trusted robust data foundation seems to be more important than ever. But they were kind of the key themes I was getting out of it.

Speaker C: Well, I wouldn't disagree with uh, with any of those Toby. I think the, I think at the moment um, SWP is sort of being treated a little bit like the Emerald City, uh, with multiple yellow brick roads sort of kind of converging on that city from different directions. But whether it be people analytics or design talent intelligence, market intelligence, if there indeed there is a sort of a differentiation between those two, um, and it speaks to the need for um, something to be done with whatever those originating technologies are telling us. Um, and that I find interesting for obvious reasons, I don't think it should be seen as the terminus though it is another step on the way through a uh, much broader ecosystem of workforce management.

Speaker B: I think that's really. I like the idea of workforce management. We should perhaps talk about that a bit more when we, when we get into it. But um, I was explaining to someone who isn't from the enterprise world the other day, the function of HR in an enterprise world and what each of the bits are. And it was someone within our organization who focuses on education and government, broadly speaking. Um, and they were saying, so it's all about organizations being able to make sure they've got the right people in the right place at the right time. Right. So I said, well, yes, kind of, you know, if we took that as an overarching message, that's not a bad one. M. And their, their response was, well, why doesn't everything roll up into strategic workforce planning then? Why is it a separate silo? Um, and I think what you've just said, David, is exactly that is you, you kind of got this Emerald city with lots of different yellow brick roads running into it. Um, but actually it's not a city in its own right and can't make decisions. So. Yeah, I, I agree. I think it's really interesting that we are definitely seeing this talent intelligence, strategic workforce planning, learning and development, workforce management or talent management all becoming in, in one place. So. Yeah, really, really. And I loved the, I absolutely loved the conference. I thought Nick, uh, was brilliant. Nick Kennedy was brilliant. The conference was really well organized. The quality of speakers and the quality of people there were absolutely, it was just absolutely brilliant.

Speaker C: It was, it was exceptional. I, I mean I was chairing one of the tracks and there was some, yeah, there was some stuff which went under most people's radar, ah, which was just absolutely stellar. There was a presentation by Ross that was just out of this world. It was kind of sort of. Well, yeah, as good as anything I'd sort of seen on this on the topic. And there was a, um, ah, really great individual from American, um, airlines talking at one of the plenary sessions. And I struggle to remember her name. I'll try to, uh, find it, um, uh, before uh, we finish to give her the credit. But she just spoke with such passion and with such clarity about how the work that they were doing were impacting their customers. Um, and that's something that we can lose sight of in our sort of our own, uh, little bubble.

Speaker B: Yeah, completely agree. And she particularly, um, and forgive me, I'm also with you, I'm m. Trying to look for her name. I'll stop trying to multitask. Um, she was particularly good at bringing together different systems to answer the business challenge. Right. So it wasn't, you know, one system or one piece of data. It was connecting and joining the dots across the whole, um, tech and data ecosystem. Fascinating.

Speaker C: Yeah. Sade Benjamin was her Name? Sade Benjamin. Big call out to you mate.

Speaker B: Sorry. Yeah, brilliant. Um, we'll dig into Roche in a bit more detail um, when we um, have finished with the news.

Speaker D: Next up on the news, it ties in very nicely to this. Um, Deloitte have done a big report. Is it time to break workforce planning out of its silo? And it's all talking about cross functional ownership and data accessibility etc, etc, so it felt very, very timely. Um, it probably should have got a bigger shout out at the conference to be honest because it felt very appropriate. A few different call outs and their different companies doing good stuff like network rail etc. Um, but for me I really did like the fact that it was being very explicit. Uh, workforce planning getting much more embedded within the organization. Breaking out the site. We keep saying silos, we've just got to get rid of them. Whether it's from a tech stack, whether it's from operational ah, planning, whether it's from a delivery mechanism. Everyone is saying we need to break this away. I think we just need to get cleaner internally in companies and just get the politics out of the way because we are, we should be looking horizontally across all of this stuff. So uh, yeah, it was a really nice report by Deloitte Insights shout out to them and the guys that wrote it because I really liked it.

Speaker C: Yeah, I agree. Um, Russell M. My old mate Russell Klosk who I shared a platform with in um, in Paris at Unleashed World this year. Uh, he's, he's one of the authors and um, yeah, you normally won't go far wrong with uh, with anything that Russell has to say. There's a very um, spooky graphic actually uh, in that uh, that article which reminds me of the original film the War of the Worlds, not the one with Tom Cruise, but one which was infinitely scarier. And it looks exactly like one of the machines out of there. So I am getting slight triggering from uh, from looking at it. But it's a good, good uh, illustration.

Speaker B: I'm gonna have to go and look at that bit now. I've only read the summary. I'm gonna have to go and have a look for a spooky graphic. Um, but the bits, the bits that I, the bits I really like bits, really. So one was tapping into hidden workers, right, which linked into flexibly planning around skills and works and not around jobs. Um, but the second bit I really liked and I was surprised that it's taken us this long to be talking about it was preparing for multiple futures versus planning for the future. Um, yeah, and I just thought that was really interesting. It was kind of like, well, what, you know, surely we're scenario planning. It was another one of those moments where it was like, surely we're doing that. But actually this implied. David, I guess it implied that organizations aren't always doing that.

Speaker C: No, I don't think they are. Um, I think it's almost enough just for organizations to sort of lurch over the line with one plan, let alone, um, multiple ones. And I think it also speaks to a truth, which is that, uh, for an awful lot of organizations, strategic workforce planning is still a reactive process to the, uh, setting a budget.

Speaker B: Yeah, completely.

Speaker D: I think that also ties into how we discussed earlier around directionally correct versus accurate and having multiple visions of the future. That gives you a much broader, uh, kind of spectrum to be able to hit with your futures. And I think that'll probably actually help the trust in the function. I know, um, I can't remember SWP conference last year or People analytics conference last year, but, um, there was a kind of straw pole of hands in the air of how accurate and how many people were correct. Force plan. And you know, most people were wrong. And I think that's, that's not unfair to say that most M strategies and most plans end up being wrong in the same way most organizational plans end up being wrong. But you hope you're wrong in a more informed way. I think having multiple versions and multiple options, I think it would just help de risk that. And so from a kind of a trust, uh, in the function perspective, you know, we might not be bang on, but we're going to be much more accurate than kind of pinning our colors to one mast and hoping for the best.

Speaker C: Oh, I agree completely. But we could still have said at the end of 2024 that, um, this AI thing, uh, we just about managed to avoid talking about it too much so far, and I don't want to major on it either, but there was going to be something more about AI at the end, by the end of this year than there was at the beginning. So we, we need to be preparing for it. And the multiple futures there would be, you know, would range from it making not a jot of difference to anybody to kind of something closer to where we are now, where sort of, uh, you know, the world seems to be full of headless chickens.

Speaker D: Completely agree. Completely agree. I think tying into that kind of accuracy versus generality in forecast, there was, um, a response by the rcr, which is the uh, Royal College of Radiologists. And I Apologize for all radiologists because I'm definitely going to trip up over some of the words we use in this next section. But RCR were responding to the ten year workforce plan by the nhs, um, and it wasn't that positive in terms of a response, if I'm going to be honest. Um, so the main thing that they noted was economic modelling findings uh, that it shared with the UK government demonstrated that investment in specialty training would save the NHS from 85 million pounds to 385 million pounds after a decade comparing to outsourcing or recruitment. And it's that classic kind of buy versus build bot and they don't really touch on the bot side of things so much. And I know the digital medtech is increasing massively and it's a hugely contentious area but um, yeah, I just found it very interesting one, they were going double down, um, on the build versus the buy and the recruitment side of things. But I just thought it was a very direct and pointed. Robust, if that's the right word. Not sure it is.

Speaker B: I liked this one because, well, two things I'm always harping on about how far forward we should be looking and I like the fact that it was looking 10 years out whether, whether the response is gloomy or not gloomy or not. At least, thank goodness we, we're looking that far out as one of the scenarios. Right. So I think you in, in line with what we've just said. But it reminds me of one of the things that we talked about at the dinner that, that we ran with Org view the night before the conference. Um, and one of the questions that we posed and everyone talked about was how different would we think if we set a future goal and worked back from it versus looking at now forward. And I think this aligns into the conversation around AI, aligns into the conversation around radiologists. And what does the future look? Um, and I think if we started to look future back, um, and David, we can go again, we can go into this in more detail but would we change what we're looking for? Because we're looking further out with a defined vision. So I liked the idea that we were thinking at least 10 years out.

Speaker C: Yes. I suppose the only thing is that ah, um, the further out you look, uh, the wider, uh, um, the range of likely sort of end states that you're going to get to. So um, you know, you obviously want to try to sort of narrow that scope as much as you can. I think the problem with the nhs and I speak only as a, I actually speak as an NHS pensioner, believe it or not, um, you know, back in my dim and distant past, I actually worked for the NHS for about 10 years. Um, you know, the transformation through which it has gone, um, has been revelatory and continues to sort of take it by surprise. The growth in expectations and I think that that's the challenge for a workforce plan involving the NHS is just exponential. Um, so I wish them well, uh, in trying to uh, get there. Whether or not we can say with any certainty that uh, we, we can only um, uh, expect to uh, to, to train from within I think is a bit fanciful. You know, the. I married to a retired nurse and um, you know, it's insulting how little she was paid throughout her career. She became a specialty sister, uh, by the end of her career and it was, you know, a pittance that she got not only as a salary but also as a, uh, as a pension. Um, you know, where's the attraction in that, uh, when so many other occupations, um, I was included, I dare say, uh, are so much more lucrative.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker D: And I think that's the longer term planning that I think we often discuss on here, that the governments struggle on, um, very long term workforce planning because they have these short cycles of four years. They're trying to make things look rosy for the next cycle on the polling etc. And I think there's some real systemic stuff we need to do to get things like the NHS healthy and running properly. But um, I think it's a much larger buy versus build piece generally. Um, which leads us nicely onto the final bit news this week, which is around McKinsey. So McKinsey did a paper, HR's Transformative Rolling an Agentic Future. And it was uh, sorry, it wasn't a paper, it was a blog post type thing. But I quite liked it, um, by Sandra Dearth, Asmus Comb and Charlotte Seiler. So thank you for you guys. But it was essentially flagging up and really highlighting how HR and within that strategic workforce planning will really be taking front and center or should really be taking a front and center seat in terms of how we engage with agentic AI and how we use these models, um, with our workforce. Uh, I really liked it, I really liked it. We talk about this stuff quite a lot, having human first or AI first, et cetera. But I like this because it kind of bridged the skills tasks, job type conversation and really looked at it from a value chain perspective of what are we actually trying to get done here, how do we get it done? And how do we use agentic AI and tech to try and help that? Um, so, yeah, last piece from McKinsey, but I really quite liked it.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm with you. Kind of a proper collaboration between humans and agents.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: With the AI decision looking at humans and human values. But equally how do we draw fast insight from the data that we've got in order to then think about what we're going to do and think about forecasting and think about adjacent skills and think about talent in a faster way. So it was a route to drawing more insight um, from the data and then to humans still making the decisions and the unified visions, including those agents I think was awesome. I'm very excited about this whole kind of co intelligent workforce. I just think it's um, it's coming faster than any of us are prepared to admit. I think it's going to be super exciting as it lands.

Speaker C: Oh it is, it is. And um, you know, if you're not already experimenting with uh, AI agents to do some of the, some of the heavy lifting that's traditionally been done manually by you know, an SWP practitioner or market intelligence or whatever, then I think you're missing out because um, there's a, there's a great deal that can be assimilated and synthesized quickly. Which is not to say that it's able to do it all perfectly or any, or anything like just um, as an example, completely different. So I don't know why I'm using it. But anyway, I asked AI to do, to produce a uh, cartoon for me um, today, uh, that would go along with the piece I've just uh, put up on LinkedIn. Not much of a plug but anyway, I'll take my chances. And um, it took about 20 different attempts to get it to do what it was that I'd not only got in my head, which I'd also actually put down, uh, on the prompt. So we should take it so far uh, and applaud it for doing that. But uh, still assume that at least the last mile is going to be up to us.

Speaker B: But overall was it faster than if you tried to develop it yourself in Canva, for example?

Speaker C: Uh, oh, I don't know. Um, I quite like drawing and cartoons and stuff. I couldn't have got it to that level of sophistication in the time. Definitely.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. I like the idea if we kind of harp back to the scenarios we've just been talking about and going, yeah, if we had one long term scenario. I quite like the idea of chucking all of the data in having your three different scenarios modeling against those and then saying, what haven't I thought about? Right. Give me a different opinion. And, and that's where I think the value is really, really powerful. Um, is the stage at which we can start to say, stop telling me what you think I want to hear, um, and start telling me what I should be listening.

Speaker C: I would agree with that. I think that's actually, um, a problem with people analytics in general, um, in that they tend to be a sort of, um, uh, a systematization of existing biases, um, or suspicions. Uh, even an AI prompt which says, where you can say, tell me the state of xyz, um, is implicitly and explicitly saying, I think there's a problem with that. It's the stuff that should keep people awake at nights that they know nothing about that we should be concerned about to try to surface.

Speaker B: I think we should bring Cole on and have a podcast with Cole about exactly that.

Speaker A: Uh, I did a talk to apparently somewhere between 0 and 10,000 HR people at, uh, a webinar last week. The reason why it's somewhere between there is, I know, 10,000 people registered, but I have no clue how many turned up to my talk because it wasn't shared. But the talk was centered around, um, the title was When Systems Start Working With Us Building Trust in the Age of Agentic hr. It was very much around how we work together rather than it replacing the work we do. And a big part of it was to your point, David. It's about kind of understanding the strengths and absolute obvious limitations of AI. And one of the biggest problems for me is that, ah, it's a people pleaser. Uh, it wants to make you happy.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: But it wants to give you an answer. You go, oh, that's the answer I was hoping for, rather than actually challenging as such. Uh, and you have to really battle to make them challenged and be objective.

Speaker C: Yes, I, I have, um, I have a, A love and frequent hate relationship with, uh, with. With AI. I find it absolutely magnificent for fast tracking some of the things that I might have in my head. And then, uh, I find it absolutely maddening when what to me feels like a relatively straightforward next step seems to baffle the bejesus out of it.

Speaker A: Yeah, go around the houses for hours sometimes. I've written that myself 12 times.

Speaker C: Yeah, don't ask it to create a spreadsheet based on the sophisticated answers it's given you in text because it simply can't do it. And power. PowerPoint is an embarrassment. My, My Granddaughter could have done better when she was 3.

Speaker B: But I think the reality, David, is it can't do it yet. Right. And that's, that's the magic word, right, in, in all of this. And I think, I'm sure I've talked about Dr. Michael Gerlick before. He's the Swiss. He works for the Swiss business school. Um, and this is an incorrect job title, but he's basically head of what's going to happen in the future. Right. And talks to organizations and enterprises. You could tell it's a wrong job title. See, skills are. Skills are the way forward, not job titles, because that's a rubbish job title. Um, but, um, he talks all the time about when you're prompting, when you're working with AI, um, making sure that you are always saying, what am I missing? Give me a different view. What else should I be doing? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Speaker A: Anyhow, should we, should we get on to the reason we're here? Sorry, no offense, Toby. The interview with David, I think Allison.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's good.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Crack on then, uh, take it away.

Speaker C: Actually, can I just start by asking you guys a question? Toby and Allison, you, you know, the. This has been my first exposure to the full force of conference season. Um, aren't you exhausted?

Speaker B: A little bit. A little bit. But actually I think if you treat conferences. So I'm, I'm on the commercial side of the business. Right. So clearly conferences are, ah, to drive prospects, drives lead, drive engagement, drive brand. Right, that's, that's a given. But if you take that as a given and then you treat conferences as um, a way of learning and every day is a school day, then I love them and I get a real energy from that. So yes, I'm tired of travel, but I'm not tired of conferences.

Speaker C: Good answer.

Speaker D: My answer is probably slightly different. Not, um, in a bad way. So although I do all the stuff and I like being on stage and Talking to people, etc. From an energy perspective, I'm a real introvert. So I'll do the conferences and I love them and I really enjoy the conversations and I love meeting people and talking about what people are getting up to and everything else. But I have to go and sit in a dark cave afterwards and recharge my batteries, um, because I find my social drain is quite high on it. But I think that the conference season is great when you're seeing the variety. You're seeing the, um, the variety of maturity, the variety of conversations. You see people's eyes light up when they start to realize, oh, actually I can get into this stuff. I think that's wonderful. And the post conference conversations you have around, that is wonderful. Um, but yeah, as Alison points out, the travel. I haven't had it anywhere near as bad as Alison has, but it can get quite brutal, uh, as well.

Speaker A: Similar to you Toad. It really drains me. Tomorrow we've got the in house, not, not conference, but sort of industry event. It's the in house Recruitment awards tomorrow night. I'm the head judge of those, so I'm gonna have to be on parade and I'm already dreading that. I'll enjoy myself. I'll drink probably a little bit too much and we'll have a good old laugh. But the next day I'll feel broken and not, not just because of the hangover. And then the next day we've got, um, a big Talent Tech Rising event that we're the headline sponsors of that I've again, I've got to smile and shake people's hands and I will just be broken by the end of Thursday.

Speaker D: Muscles wouldn't have worked that hard for a long time.

Speaker B: You know what I think is interesting is that I, um, Just for those that don't, aren't aware. So I think this is not going to be a bombshell. I love talking and I love asking people questions and I love being nosy. Um, and so I think you, that's where I get my energy from. It's, you know, asking people something's a. David said like, oh, yeah, that's really. It just kind of sparks your brain. Um, I can't imagine an environment where you don't get to interact with brilliant people and ask them questions. Right. So I just, I guess that's the way that I approach it. Toby, maybe it's just because you're one of the brilliant people that, you know, you get drawn by it. Anyway, that's enough. Yeah, I'm going to herd us, um, in the right direction to talk about David. So, David, you managed to, to steer us away from you for a short period of time. This is supposed to be about you, so I'm going to steer it back again. Um, and actually I want you to start with giving us a summary of your career because you said decades ago, I used to work for the nhs. I was like, whoa, where did that come from? So then I had to go. And I did see it was some time ago, but even so it made me go, actually, you've had a really varied career. Give us a summary of it.

Speaker C: Well, yeah, that's it is true. In fact, my eclectic, I think might be a better word for my career. Um, uh, I was an 11 plus boy, which meant, uh, I went to grammar school, uh, in Suffolk, Uh, and for reasons I still can't quite fathom, I was attracted to the idea of spending a year in Kenya straight after sixth form, um, as a volunteer teacher, which I did. Uh, unfortunately I'd spent a little bit too much time in sixth form, enjoying myself and being head of school. So I didn't get to York University to read history. Instead I ended up applying and getting into Essex University to Recomparative Government. But by the time I'd spent a year out in Kenya and taught people for 40 shillings, sorry, 600 shillings a month, which was 40 pounds. Um, and we're talking 1978. So this was the era of aerograms and um, no telephones, apart from one in Mombasa's post office about 50 miles away. Uh, I wasn't a very good student, let's just put it that way. Uh, and I, um, I was a very good DJ and I also made um, food for the uh, for the bands that came along. Although Chrissy Hind of the Pretenders didn't like the sandwiches that I made her. I'm not going to say exactly what she said because it was quite rude. Uh, so, yeah, dropped out to university, spent a year working, um, tumble dryers behind a psychiatric hospital laundry, um, ah, tunnel wash machine. And last week of that, um, I met Fiona Fiononi, as she is called in the book, he says. Trying a bit of a plug there. And uh, we've been together for almost 45 years. I went into NHS accountant, uh, into NHS Accountancy, um, and from that systems implementation, um, working for various software houses, uh, in professional services, then bought and sold a couple of companies not terribly successfully. Worked in the US, worked in Germany, then 13 years in RBS NatWest, which was kind of where I got into this stuff.

Speaker B: So. Yeah, so what happened there? So you went in as a program manager for technology and then, right, you landed in resource management. So how was that transition? Was that driven from a place of a workforce challenge or something else?

Speaker C: Uh, uh, I think it was driven by sort of a, uh, preemptive redeployment to avoid me going out on my ear, uh, when a particular finance, uh, program. I'd done quite well up until then, but then, uh, there was a program which didn't go as well and it was very much in the RBS way at the time to you uh, know when, when a program came to an end, you didn't just redeploy somebody to another program, you just fired the people who were on the program. Uh, very expensive, but sort of, uh, you know, that, that was the disposable nature of people in that, uh, particular zone. But I got moved across to, uh, do what they called, right, shoring, um, moving roles across from the UK to India, uh, and it turned into a full blown redundancy handling ex. I just got interested in the data from then on, um, because it just seemed to me fascinating and full of endless possibilities, uh, for interpretation and uh, greater understanding.

Speaker B: And it's interesting because that period when you talk about program management, so 2012, so that's what, 13 years ago there or thereabouts. That's not that long ago in the bigger scheme of things. When we think about talent being so available that you hide it onto a program and then fired it, and you think about what has changed in the labor market in such actually a really short space of time to mean that now we hear that and think really, oh my God, that's bonkers. It's fascinating, isn't it?

Speaker C: Well, it is, uh, and I'm glad you haven't asked me directly why do you think that is, David? Because I'm not sure I would actually know exactly what's happened. Um, ah. Is it that people have just become more picky about, uh, their careers? Have we suddenly had an enormous dearth of, uh, new talent coming in? Um, or is it just that the pace of things is such now that we're not churning out people who are appropriately qualified quickly enough to, uh, meet the ever changing demand, are we making it actually almost too quick for ourselves to be able to cope with it?

Speaker B: Yeah. And that's where I would have landed. If you kind of throw me under a bus and said, what do you think? I just think the pace of change on everything, right? That's the macroeconomics, it's the geopolitical, it's technology, um, and therefore its workforce is just so fast that we've got to look at a different way of looking at our workforce.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And that's, it's less, um, uh, I want to say disposable. That's the one that's the wrong word. It's less dispensable than it was. Right.

Speaker C: It's so incredibly wasteful. And what really got me going, uh, with this stuff was that, uh, I could see that there were ways if we were just able to join the different bits of workforce Data that we had together, um, to get different views. I, uh, was innately curiosity, uh, ah, curious. Um, and also as a bit of a spreadsheet geek. So I just experimented with different data sets to see what it was possible to uh, connect together and what it might tell me. Um, and then I got given the chance to lead resource, uh, management for the change function of um, rbs. Now that was a great opportunity, but it was also fraught with me very similar challenges to what we've got now. We're now talking about 2015. There are thereabouts. And um, it was if people are being placed at risk of redundancy, can we create some kind of clearinghouse to move them across to a different part of the bank so that they don't lose their job? Great idea. We're still experimenting with this kind of stuff now. Um, huge institutional resistance to it, uh, because the perception was that a project manager in one part of the business couldn't possibly be a good project manager in the other because they didn't know that part of the business.

Speaker B: Did that come from um, a position of the business saying this is a way of us saving money on a redundancy process, or did it come from a position of saying let's look at our people through a, ah, different lens and see how transferable they are?

Speaker C: Uh, it was initiated from hr. Um, a dear friend of mine, Amy Burns Thompson was uh, the original, you know, the originator of the concept. But uh, it was my job and the job of my colleague up in um, Scotland, Tom Carrigan, to actually turn it into a reality. Uh, we were fortunate that um, RBS was trying to sell off uh, a part of the bank at the time. Um, you may have heard of Williams and Glyn. Uh, it was part of the price they were paying for getting all the uh, government subsidies in uh, 2008. And um, so there was a big demand for people in that new bank. And then there was sort of a great screeching of tires when they realized that it was simply too difficult to try to separate. And all of these people who were charged off to the new bank, some of them just in search of a new bolt hole, others in search of a sort of an extension and growth in their careers, suddenly realized that they were up the creek without a paddle. And there was this mad rush of boots back into RBs and uh, people calling us up all the time, sort of hoping that we might be able to find them a bolt hole, which we did. Uh, in the end we managed to uh, find homes for over 500 people who were at risk of redundancy. Um, and that, well, it proved to me that we could do it. The question was, you know, could we do better than that? Because all we were doing was kind of establishing opportunities for people at the, the moment that it became apparent they were going to lose their jobs. That doesn't give you an awful lot of time. Um, what if we could pull that moment of likelihood further back so that we could actually prepare more people for opportunities which arose?

Speaker B: And that's exciting about the world that we're in today. Right. Is that's definitely where workforce management, workforce planning, we can uh, talk about that in more detail. Ah, is thinking today how do we think about our workforce in a more holistic way rather than thinking about functions and jobs? Right. Yeah, it's very exciting.

Speaker C: Well, it is, but I would strike a note of caution and say I am um, still not convinced that um, the kind of thinking which I believe to be the right kind of thinking has found its way into the mainstream.

Speaker B: Yes, I agree.

Speaker C: Uh, yeah, I think that I see too many examples of short termism, um, exactly the same way of sort of um, dispensing with people or not really thinking about the long term, um, infecting the mindset and basically shoving any kind of longer term uh, perspectives out into the margins.

Speaker B: I think it's um, it's kind of, I'm not sure there's a, there's a solution to it. Right. We live in a world where we're driven by shareholder returns and we live in a world where CEOs average tenure is seven years. You know, it, it's kind of difficult to encourage thinking beyond that period. Um, that's, and we've talked about this a lot as a business. Yeah. This is major transformation. This is not a, oh, can we have a little go at doing something?

Speaker C: Uh, I, yes, I, I, I agree. Sorry to interrupt. I'm not sorry, otherwise I wouldn't have done it.

Speaker B: But um, not sorry enough.

Speaker C: No, exactly, exactly. Uh, I, I, it is definitely something to do with the way in which people are remunerated, which, which kind of pushes against this, this, this kind of ah, approach. There is nobody, bar almost none, um, in a business who is currently rewarded for um, ensuring the longer term stewardship of the company despite the fact that that's actually in the uh, shareholders even greater interest. Um, and until that kind of penny drops, um, and I'm not saying it's done out of ignorance, it's just that that is the way it is at the moment, um, we won't see massive change.

Speaker B: I agree.

Speaker C: But I think there are opportunities to remunerate and incentivize people differently. I think there's one other, um, way which it's a lever which I still don't feel we have pulled certainly to the fullest extent. And that is risk.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: What is the risk the workforce poses to the successful execution of even short term business strategy?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Because, you know, don't tell me that sort of current short term business practice, as far as the workforce is concerned, is, ah, a slick, um, you know, sweetly oiled running machine. Because it's not.

Speaker B: No, no, I, I completely agree with what you're saying. I think that typically we haven't thought about workforce risk as a risk. I remember years ago I did a white paper that was um, it looked at the number of, I think it was FTSE 100, so forgive me, but it looked at the number of FTSE 100 that said, um, talent is in one of our top three risks. Access to talent and access to workforce is in one of our top three risks. Risks. And then it looked at how many of them had got a succession plan in place. Right. And the two things didn't marry up. Yeah, at the time it was, and this is 10 years ago, but at the time it was on paper, yes, talent is one of our biggest risks, but nobody was really doing anything about it. I think that is shifting, but still not to the extent that it needs to do in light of everything else that's going on in the world. Now I'm slightly worried that we are, are nearly 45 minutes in and I said, for goodness sake David, don't let me get all the way in without starting to ask you about um, your transition, what's happening next? And then the exciting thing. So, um, I'm going to skip a whole bit about what you then did then in your career, which we have, if we have time, we can come back to it. But you're moving on. You're transitioning out of corporate world.

Speaker C: I am, I am. Congratulations. The Dark Artistry newsletter, available uh, through all good LinkedIn website websites, uh, is transitioning into uh, Dark Artistry, the business, uh, with a, uh, side helping of David, uh, Edwards swp dot com. Don't try going there at the moment because I haven't built the website. But uh, I just thought that the, well, the book is a great opportunity for me to be able to sort of leverage a different me. Um, you know, there is also the uh, non trivial uh, issue that I am uh, shall we say mature years now and uh, some of corporate life really I find quite disenchanting and I have no further need for it, thank you very much. Uh, but I believe very much that there are gaps in our knowledge of how to go about making SWP work at the moment. It's still an emerging, um, profession, I think we can call it a profession, ah, certainly a practice. And there is a need for it to be made practical and accessible. Uh, and so my hope, my aim is to help the clients of um, advisory companies, maybe tech vendors even, who knows, uh, you know, subtle hint there.

Speaker B: Um, noted.

Speaker C: With master classes, um, learnings, clinics, diagnostics, um, even speeches to user conferences, bit of thought leadership, um, some, um, um, maybe a little bit of uh, university lecture lecturing thrown in as well. Basically all oriented around. Here's how you make sense of this stuff.

Speaker B: Okay, we haven't really talked about, we've kind of just jumped straight into swp. And, and whilst most of our audience will understand what that means, um, some may not. So can you, can you talk? I know that you've put your blog out, which I haven't read because you only told me about it literally just before we came in. Um, but your blog today on LinkedIn about what SWP is not. Can you summarize that for us?

Speaker C: Yeah, well, perhaps, yeah, perhaps I should be a little bit more sort of positive, uh, and say what I think it definitely is. And I think it is actually a bit of a metaphor for a number of the things that we talked about on this call already. Um, it is about, um, ensuring that we make the workforce fit for its future business purpose, um, and consequently making sure that we mitigate the risks to the business of it not currently being fit for purpose. And as I said also earlier, uh, extending the window of opportunity to prepare the workforce for its future business purpose and in so doing creating benefit not just for the business from uh, a cost and a readiness and a flexibility, agility point of view, but also benefiting the individuals by giving them a broader, richer experience as an employee.

Speaker B: Really interesting. So what isn't it just give me. Because I think that's right. But what are the three things it really isn't?

Speaker C: Well, it's not just about long term annual headcount forecasting, um, because if you think about it, um, as you yourselves said a little bit earlier on, um, each year, next year is not another country, it's just part of a continuum. And the end, uh, of each year turned out to be radically different to the end that we thought it might be, um, it is therefore not about a static exercise or a process. It's a way of thinking and it's a way of reacting and responding to and, ah, recognizing indeed the changes which are taking place all around us all of the time and making sense of the implications for the workforce and saying not only this is what it's going to mean for the workforce, but this is how you do something about it.

Speaker B: Interesting. Um, you talked earlier, I think I can call strategic workforce planning an emerging profession, um, which was quite interesting. What do you think of the skills that somebody needs to be able to be effective at strategic workforce planning?

Speaker C: Well, I remember being asked this, uh, at the first SWP conference in London. Um, and I think I ended up basically walking, uh, the poor audience through my entire CV whilst there was, uh, an assistant at the back frantically waving a time sign.

Speaker B: Uh, so my time sign is if you don't answer this one succinctly, we won't have time to. About the book.

Speaker C: Okay. All right.

Speaker A: You need a notional blackmail there, Alison.

Speaker B: Just, just be honest.

Speaker C: Look, I've spent my life saying way too much when only two words would do, so I'm not going to stop now. But, um, you need a whole basket of the different power skills, whether that be resilience, critical, uh, thinking, um, the ability to evaluate, communicate, uh, talk at multiple different levels, uh, across the organization. You also need to have half, more than half, an eye on data. Oh, I can hear some music here.

Speaker B: That's funky.

Speaker C: It was very nice.

Speaker B: Don't know whose it was. It wasn't me.

Speaker C: Wasn't it? Okay.

Speaker B: No, it must be.

Speaker A: It was me. That was my fault. I wasn't trying to add some mood music, David, to what you were saying, but one of my biggest pause while on my keyboard and suddenly set something off.

Speaker C: I mean, you know, I think a musical interlude isn't going to hurt anybody. I think the more experiences you have across, uh, business, uh, as well as hr, the better it will be. You certainly need to be data savvy and curious about what that data is actually saying. Um, you need to be able to talk at detail and also, um, really big picture, uh, and flip between them. I, um, think sort of there's a synthesis, the ability to synthesize multiple inputs and say this stuff matters and that stuff doesn't. So let's concentrate on the stuff that matters.

Speaker B: Love that. So business focus, short term, long term. I can't say that word that you just said then, so I'm not even going to try but the one that starts with S, um, and data savvy. Data savvy and curious. Right. Really interesting. Um, you touched quickly on the Roche session at the Strategic Workforce Planning Conference in London. I wasn't lucky enough to go to it. Can you summarize what you thought was good about it?

Speaker C: Well, they embodied many of the things that I just, uh, just kind of said. But what particularly struck me, and I think this is part of the evolution that strategic workforce planning is going through at the moment. It is not so much, um, planning strategically for the whole workforce, but planning for the workforce which is at this moment in time, strategic. And uh, that's a very different proposition. M and it means actually making sense of where the workforce is m having its biggest effect and impact. I don't know why I'm gesticulating here and there's no camera on. But anyway, where is the workforce most impactful on the business at this particular stage? And is everything about those workforce segments healthy? Um, and if it's not, what have we got to do to restore it to health or to make it ready for the next stage? And I would also say argue quite strongly that a perennially critical segment of the workforce is that which is in decline or whose need is in decline because therein lies, um, the pool of talent that could, uh, conceivably become the people who meet the supply for, uh, the next phase of demand.

Speaker B: Interesting. Can you, can you describe either what they meant or what your interpretation of healthy is in that scenario?

Speaker C: Well, nobody wants to, no, nobody wants to make people redundant. Um, and yet redundancy remains a kind of sort of go to for, you know, pretty much every organization when we know that, um, we can not only save an awful lot of money. According to the Financial Services skills commission, what, three years ago it was nearly £50,000 per person. By reskilling them instead of making somebody redundant and hiring somebody else. But we can also make an awful lot of difference to the emotional, career and mental well being of those people who would otherwise be impacted. I've been fired a few times. It's a horrible thing. Um, and mental well being matters a great deal to me. I am a one in four and I'm proud of it. And uh, I just believe we can do so much better.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker D: On that mental health and wellbeing piece, sorry, I completely agree with everything you said, by the way. Uh, but m, we talked about the conference circuit earlier and the last three conferences I've been at, there's been huge sections on mental health and wellbeing and the last one, the SWP there was an amazing presentation. I forget the lady's name, so I do apologize. But it was the bit that really stood out was it was linking, uh, wellbeing and the dollar value. And it was the first presentation I've seen this season where if I was on the board it would make me stand up because you can see the dollar value and you can see the ROI of investing into this stuff. And I think that's something I think has been missing a lot. You know, we've seen the research. We know that if you've got better mental health and uh, you're going to be a better performer in the role. We know that if you have a good work life balance, you're going to perform better. We know remote work, we know it's better. You have more well balanced, happier individuals. And yet we've got a huge push to return to office. I struggle on this one in that, but I think the data is there. We know it makes sense. But companies still see it as this kind of fluffy topic that they don't really engage with properly. They still would rather, uh, manage sick days and manage poor performance because they're binary and easier to deal with rather than trying to actually deal with things upstream.

Speaker C: I couldn't agree more. Um, I think it was Dina from AstraZeneca that you're talking about.

Speaker B: Um, I think, I think it was. I don't know if it was. I think, I think she was from axa.

Speaker C: Oh, I beg her pardon.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was Dina. Yes, I think you're right. Yeah, but, but I think you're. Yeah, the dollar value made me sit up like you. I tape. You know me well enough to know that I have been. And forgive me, David, this is not reflective of you. I, I have, have been in, in the camp of m. Well being. I don't mean mental health. I mean you broaden that. Um, uh, you know, okay, we're all here to do a job. Um, but actually the dollar value was a real sit up and go. Um, now, before, otherwise we're going to keep talking otherwise and then I'm going to get in trouble with myself. Um, I'm a very good boss to myself. You see, um, we've alluded a few times, David, to the book. Um, tell us what's it called? When does it come out? How do people get hold of it? Why should we buy it?

Speaker C: Okay, um, it is called the Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook. Um, it's published by Kogan Page. It's uh, available for pre order now from www.koganpage.com SWPH. Um, it is in print and on the bookshelves on the 3rd of January, uh, in the UK and I think it's the third or fourth week of, uh, January in the United States. Um, why should you get it? Well, it's not seeking to compete with the great works by Adam Gibson, um, or Ross Spartman or any of those great people. Um, it is a take on this that tries to simplify it, make, um, it more accessible using exactly the kind of, uh, rather quaint, whimsical stories that I've used in the course of this podcast. Um, but also to give voice to the practitioners about what it is like trying to do this stuff and what are the practical challenges of trying to make it work. So I go into quite a lot of detail over sort of, you know, how if X is happening, what does that really mean? Or if somebody says why, then, you know, how should we be looking to address that? So we talk about a lot of change management. How do you deal with objections? How do you actually cope with mental health as a chapter given over to people's own stories, uh, on that? And, um, how do you know whether or not you've actually made a difference at the end of it? So yeah, it's not trying to sort of provide huge new theories on anything. Um, it is trying to just make it possible for people. As I said, I'm trying to show people the way.

Speaker B: I love the sound of that. Not least because, um, it reminds me of a little of Toby's book, right? How do we practically do something about this? It's not fluff, it's not theory from what you're saying. This is, this is how you do it, right? This is, these are the key things that you need to look out for. This is, this is your next steps. And I think in, in a world where, um, workforce is increasingly important, but it's changing like mad actually. People need that guidance, they need that holding hands. They need the expertise of somebody like you, you to say this is the stuff that you should be looking at.

Speaker C: That's very kind of you to say dark artistry.net by the way. You know, just, just fill the, fill it, fill in the con, uh, contact thing at the bottom. You know, I like friends. Any friends.

Speaker B: I'd like to think we're friends without a web form, David, but that's okay. I've been put back in my box.

Speaker C: The one thing that does, does scare me slightly. Um, and, and it was only sort of A part of the book, but where I was talking about sort of, um, uh, AI and also, uh, skills and how I feel that sort of, you know, we all now sort of believe that skills on its own is not enough and we need to be talking about work and tasks and all of that kind of thing. But it feels as things have moved on, um, so quickly since July, the end of July, when I finished writing the book that, you know, there's already a second edition that needs to be written.

Speaker B: Yes. Are you on it?

Speaker C: No.

Speaker B: Okay, let's review that bit. When I say, are you on it? Next time, just say yes.

Speaker C: Yes, yes.

Speaker B: There you go. Perfect.

Speaker D: Absolutely.

Speaker A: Alison, this gives us the perfect opportunity. Opportunity to ask David to come back again, doesn't it?

Speaker B: I was just thinking exactly the same thing, actually. We come back, come back post release and all the rest of it. Um, that was also my subtle hint. Um, I think so. I've got, um, one more question, if I may. M for you.

Speaker C: Oh, please do.

Speaker B: Um, apart from buy the book, clearly the message to everybody. If, if you are in strategic workforce planning and you've not experimented or used labour market data, what would your top tips be for somebody coming into this space?

Speaker C: Now, start straight away, um, because, um, that, that's going to give you something that can give your, your business oppo the heebie jeebies. Uh, because, um, if you can join together the knowledge of what it is that you're going to do and what you're going to need alongside the. How difficult is it going to get the people to do that? Then all of a sudden you've got a story and storytelling is a big part of, uh, this. So, you know, wherever you can get hold of it, wherever it's available. Yeah, go for it.

Speaker B: Really interesting. Thank you, thank you very much for that. Um, and I 100% think we need to have you back because, um, I could keep talking for hours, but, um, I, we're just over the hour and

Speaker C: I do, I do. I, I honestly, I have loved this. This is so much fun.

Speaker B: Yeah, cool.

Speaker C: I do need to get out more, by the way.

Speaker B: Let me spend the last month.

Speaker C: I do.

Speaker B: Oh, okay. In which case, if I'm quite pleased to be home, um, well, there's, there's loads of conferences coming up in, in, um, the New Year People Analytics World in Zurich. That's a starting point. David, see you there in February.

Speaker C: With luck and the following wind. Absolutely.

Speaker A: David, thank you very much. That was, that was fantastic. You kind of answered this question already, but I always, always like to ask our, our guests In a completely non 70s innuendo way, how was it for you?

Speaker C: You really should, you, you really shouldn't ask someone from the 70s who grew up in them to have that kind of question because, uh, you know all you're going to get back from me is, ooh, uh, missus,

Speaker A: that's fine. That's all I'm going to accept. I'm not going to talk to you. I'm not going to ask you anything else.

Speaker D: Uh,

Speaker A: brilliant. So to all our lovely listeners out there, hope you've enjoyed today's conversation as, as, as much as we have. I don't think we've laughed quite as much as we have during this one. Uh, please do us a favor, share it with anyone who needs to hear it. If you know a HR leader wrestling with workforce planning, or a CFO who needs convincing about it, or anyone trying to future proof their organization's talent strategy, then this is definitely one for them. Um, Toby, Alison, David, say bye folks. Bye folks.

Speaker C: Bye folks.

Speaker A: Thank you everyone. And uh, to our audience, stay curious, stay brilliant and most important, stay intelligent folks.

Speaker B: Bye bye.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening. Before you go, I want to remind you about our generous sponsor, Lightcast. Here's that well spoken fellow again to tell you about their amazing product.

Speaker C: Lightcast is the global authority on labour market data. By collecting, analyzing and refining profiles, job postings and market data globally, Lightcast provides actionable data driven talent intelligence, giving HR leaders the context to make better decisions. The world's top companies trust Lightcast to deliver clarity in a complex world of work. For more, visit Lightcast IO.